Create random passwords with PowerShell

A task I see myself do occasionally, is to generate a password or other symmetric secret. Of course, to avoid things like “Azure123!” and even going against battery horse stable mechanisms, I like to generate random strings; and store these in a password vault. Either online, or local.

At work, I (have to) use PowerShell quite a bit, so I use the following line to come up with a 20 char random password, containing digits, upper- and lowercase alphanumeric characters:

-join ((48..57)+(65..90)+(97..122) | Get-Random -count 20 | %{[char]$_ })

If you need to include special chars, I typically tend to add (!, #, *, -, @ and ~) to the mix, since they’re unlikely to have a special meaning to an underlying system. Their corresponding ASCII values can be added simple:

-join ((33,35,42,45,64,126)+(48..57)+(65..90)+(97..122) | Get-Random -count 36 | %{[char]$_ })